Thread: Buff, Shake and Mo's Pumpkins thread.

OK, so I listened to Oceania, and I'm thoroughly impressed.

Following are my thoughts during the listen:

Oceania

Wow. Back to basic songwriting for Mr. Corgan, which oftentimes means brilliant.

Not sure if Corgan formulated this the way I interpreted it, but the first two songs were very reminiscent of the overdrive, power chord driven Zeitgeist album, and I thought, 'oh here we go.'

Then The Celestials kicks in and we finally get that stripped down Corgan guitar playing, which crescendos into a power-ballad type song, but it has more complexity than shallow 80s rock power ballads. I loved that transition.

That's what made Corgan's songwriting so great, early in his career. His ability to punch the overdrive button and the distortion pedal and then combine that with melodic, acoustic-driven songs to fill the void. He was versatile. He lost that on Adore, Machina and Zeitgeist. I think he got it back here. Adore was too avant garde and Machina and Zeitgeist had too much distortion. And on Zeitgeist he completely lost melody.

Anyway...My Love is Winter and One Diamond, One Heart were great. The latter was straying away from anything he's done with a synth-pop type feel.

Pinwheels was his best songwriting since Porcelina and Muzzle on Melon Collie and Mayonnaise on Siamese Dream.

I thought Oceania was the most disjointed song on the record. He tried to jam too much into a song, and it just didn't fit.

And just when I was about to comment that there wasn't any rockers on the backside of the album, he comes through with The Chimera and Glissandra. The former being the much better song.

Thought the ending was a little weak, but a good listen, nevertheless.

All in all it doesn't quite catch the magic of Siamese Dream and Melon Collie, and maybe that's me speaking as a teenager, but it is his best album since. He finally got out of his one-track mindset when it came to albums, and delivered a complete album.